Stop trying to live, and live already

April 08, 2009|By Stephen Guthrie Courier Columnist

Next week I reach one of those major life milestones: I’m turning 62.

I’ve been approved for social security, and submitted the four pounds of paper to apply for my pension from 16 years with the federal government. Now the race is on to see if the treasury will stay solvent for the remaining 18.8 years of my current life expectancy.

Now, let me put on the record that in my mind I am still about 42. After all, I have a daughter in the fourth grade, so technically I’m not allowed to think, feel, or act “old.” But since the mortality tables would have me believe three fourths of my years are now behind me, these last few days I’ve been reflecting on life so far.

I had a lot of time to do that last week as we drove back from spring break in Washington DC. My wife grew up in the DC suburbs, and I had lived there for a decade. The focus of our trip was the Smithsonian and tours of the Capital and the White House, but there was time set aside to show our daughter our old haunts. Those side trips brought back a flood of memories that I rolled around in my daydreams as we sped down turnpikes in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

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We had taken our daughter to see the house where her Mom was raised, and the elementary school a mile away where, in a different era, she and the neighborhood kids had walked through undeveloped woods and new subdivisions to get to class.

We had shown her the house where we’d lived near Harpers Ferry, West Va. when I’d worked for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the late eighties.

The two Christmas trees we’d planted in the front yard were now 20 feet tall, and the maples we’d transplanted from our home in Norwood when we’d moved east were thriving. We had taken her hiking on the C&O canal, and had showed her where we’d taken our four golden retrievers swimming in the Potomac.

So as I drove the turnpikes west I mulled over scenes from the twenty years since we’d left Washington.

I had been 40 when we’d moved there, already running hard in a period of my life in which I would advance the fastest, earn the most, and work the hardest. It was a time when a normal work week started at 60 hours and went up from there, and included years when I spent as many as 200 nights a year in hotels.

Then somewhere around Akron I was struck by this sense of the pointlessness and futility of it all. Suddenly, the priorities that had defined me during that season of life in which one strives and struggles seemed to be a questionable use of the gift of days.

Rolling west, I began to wonder about the roads not taken, the opportunities not pursued, and out of nowhere found myself disappointed over the choices I’d made.

Out of nowhere I found myself wishing I’d understood earlier the difference between the urgent and the important, and opted more often for quality instead of quantity. I began to daydream how much money I’d have today if I’d learned earlier how to admire without the need to acquire.

I found myself disappointed in having spent so much of myself making a living that I’d somehow gotten sidetracked on making a life. And suddenly I was deeply regretful over the people I’d shorted or offended along the way to upward mobility.

In short, I found myself wishing I’d known then what I know now, for I would have stopped striving and started living long before I finally did.

The Bible authors struggled with the paradoxical futility of life, too.

David writes of the blink of an eye that is our years on earth, sixty years, or seventy if we’re lucky, and compares it to the flower that blossoms, then withers with age, and disappears so that its place remembers it no more.

Solomon takes two chapters of Ecclesiastes to enumerate his great wealth and accomplishments, then dismisses it all as futile vanity. He bemoans the striving of man, laboring in the sun, his mind troubled, only to pass it all on to heirs who did not work for it.

And Solomon, in all his wisdom, concludes that there is no point to all that striving except that a man should enjoy to the fullest the life that God has given him, regarding it as a gracious gift from a benevolent Father.

In the face of apparent pointlessness, Solomon opted for a life of grateful rejoicing and doing good with the days we are granted.